Joe Biden took the adage to be “in office but not in power” a bit too literally. The 46th US president would often sit in the Oval Office without the ability to exercise power. Or actually exercise, for that matter. Or work past 5pm. Or speak. Or walk.
People could see his infirmity. But the truth was far worse than we thought.
We now know Biden was senile during his presidency. He would fail to recognise decades-old acquaintances, or freeze with his mouth agape. His annual exam suspiciously did not include a cognitive test. Aides gave him black Hoka trainers to straighten his gait and began walking beside him to his helicopter in order to literally catch him if he tripped. Congressional Democrats left meetings with him thinking of their parents with dementia. Around Thanksgiving, Biden was handed cue cards in case he was asked what he was thankful for. His team debated pushing him around in a wheelchair and laid down fluorescent tape to guide him through parties with few people. Like puppeteers, they used contraptions to bring him to life.
Despite what they knew, Biden and his team ran for re-election. Steven Spielberg dialled in to train the president on his stilted delivery, while his aides impersonated Trump. But Biden was exhausted and couldn’t stop coughing. The world was spinning on a lozenge. At one point, Biden walked outside, found a nice sun lounger and took a nap by the pool.
And then this attempted cover-up was savagely pulled apart over 90 minutes in front of the world. The catastrophe seemed imminent from the moment Biden walked on stage on 27 June. With beady black eyes, he stared catatonically at the floor, stopping and starting like a silent film at half speed. “We finally beat Medicare,” he said to a nation that watched on in disbelief. “He just lost the election,” CNN’s Dana Bash wrote in a note slipped to her co-moderator, Jake Tapper, as Tapper notes in Original Sin, a book on Biden’s decline which is enthralling Washington, co-authored with Axios reporter Alex Thompson.
Later that night at a rally, Jill Biden took the microphone and gushed to her husband: “You answered every question. You knew all the facts!” Those closest to the president were holding him up to standards you would expect from a small child.
The president’s staff lied with a cultish fervour in order to keep the fiction alive that this man was fit to lead for another four years. Like any good lie, at times they believed it to be true. After the debate, the aides thought he had just had a bad night. They could not see the truth the world had witnessed. Steve Ricchetti, Biden’s right hand, “told a nervous aide that the debate wasn’t a big deal”. Calls for the president to blitz the media in order to prove the debate was a blip were ignored. The reason is now clear: this was not a bad night for Biden, this was the norm.
Some books on election campaigns achieve little more than binding a year’s worth of New York Times articles into a book jacket. Original Sin is a comprehensively sourced autopsy of the agonised end to Biden’s 50-year career.
It’s accusatory, indignant, righteous – and convincing. It points the finger at the toady advisers around Biden for duping the country. “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” Tapper and Thompson write.
Some Washington old hands still say with a shrug that Biden is Biden. They cannot point to where the gaffe-prone politician with a stutter they’d known for decades ended and the senile president began. There’s a dose of self-delusion, here: anyone who flicked between clips of Biden’s debates last year and those as recent as 2020 on their phone would see a man deteriorating rapidly.
Original Sin shows that the deception about the fitness of the man with the nuclear codes started years earlier. Some of the first signs of decline came after the death of his beloved son Beau from cancer in 2015. By 2020, staff would secretly pre-load answers into a prompter for him to read in interviews. Since at least 2022, there were moments he could not recall the names of top aides whom he saw every day. Top Democrats who expressed concerns to the White House were told by Biden’s team that he was “fine”.
The truth spilled out from an unexpected source. In February last year, a Department of Justice investigation into confidential documents found in Biden’s garage said the president was an “elderly man with a poor memory”. The White House went on the attack. Vice-president Kamala Harris called the report “gratuitous”, and an MSNBC anchor devoted a segment to whether the special prosecutor was guilty of “ageism”.
You get the sense Biden never knew how senile he came across. When he awoke the day after Harris, who became the Democratic nominee, lost the 2024 election, he still thought he could have won it himself. That delusion was partly because Biden did not have the right information. If he had, he would have known that victory was a mirage.
In the weeks after the debate, as the party convulsed, Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader, asked the president whether he’d spoken to his pollsters. He hadn’t; Schumer had. “They think it’s a 5 per cent chance,” Schumer told him. “Really?” Biden asked, adding, “You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met.” Why did Biden find it audacious to discuss the most basic campaign facts – the polls?
Biden’s sin was not that he left only 107 days for Harris to campaign. The more time voters spent with Harris the more they would realise how hollow a politician she was. The real problem with Biden’s late decision was that no one else could seize the nomination. His stubbornness saddled the party with Harris. It’s a story reflected in two other books on the campaign: Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, a colourful, sweary account restricted to 2024 itself, and Chris Whipple’s slim, selective volume Uncharted.
Allen and Parnes report that Harris became the nominee partly because Democrats did not want to leapfrog the first African and Indian-American vice-president. Neither Barack Obama nor Nancy Pelosi wanted her as the candidate, and their plans for a mini-primary were frustrated. One mistake was followed by another. The party was as delusional about Harris’s political acuity as it was about Biden’s mental acuity. Harris was the type of politician who asked her aides to host a practice soiree with them acting as guests in preparation for an informal dinner at the home of a Washington journalist. Trump’s campaign manager Susie Wiles told Whipple in Uncharted, “We couldn’t believe how bad she was.”
Consider why Harris didn’t distance herself from Biden – the fatal flaw in her campaign. She was unflinchingly loyal to Biden as vice-president and had also inherited Biden’s team — but she also did not know enough about policy to say what she would do differently. “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” Allen and Parnes write. She had no theory of power. Her plan for an “opportunity economy” did not cut it. As Trump’s adviser Paul Manafort told Whipple: “We laughed every time they brought out celebrities. All that did is further the divide between the targeted voters we were going after and their base.”
A few weeks after the election Harris’s chief of staff Sheila Nix said Harris ran a “pretty flawless campaign”. They are ready to do it all again.
You don’t need to spend long with these three books before you start to wonder whether their authors might have been kind enough to publish their findings a bit earlier. It could have spared everyone the headache of an administration pondering the suspension of habeas corpus.
In January I asked a journalist from a major broadcaster why the press was so quiet on Biden’s decline, expecting them to complain about the media’s reverence for the White House. Instead she claimed that they “didn’t have the sources” to report a fact obvious even to reporters thousands of miles away. Most sources wouldn’t have wanted to talk before Biden stepped down, true. But these books suggest enough probably did.
Thompson and Tapper preface their account with a disclaimer: “Journalism about Biden does not excuse or normalize any actions and statements by anyone else.” Here is our answer: the fear that fair reporting on Biden would help Trump is left hanging on the page. HL Mencken wrote that the “only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down”. But in Trump’s America, journalists can only glance at his opponents from the corner of their eyes, in the brief moments they look away from Trump himself.
That fear of Trump bred timidity towards Biden, and allowed the cover-up to go unexposed. Few Democrats would now say this led to a better outcome than if the facts were ruthlessly reported early on.
In Darkness at Noon – a meditation on the corrupting power of the idea that the ends justify the means – Arthur Koestler writes that, “We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.” The consequent logic here was that stopping Donald Trump to save democracy meant protecting Biden at all costs. That seems to have been what Biden’s inner circle thought. You can’t help but speculate that some journalists mistook that for their duty, too.
It did not work. Biden’s team tried to beat Trump at the game of lies. How naive: you cannot out-lie Trump. He lies in the daylight, like an exhibitionist. His lies are paraded like Soviet missiles in Red Square. Those that care about the truth know that he lies. Everyone else either likes it, or believes him, whatever the facts.
By turning the lie into a mark of authenticity, Trump has robbed the media of its ability to attack politicians for hypocrisy. He implicitly asks voters: would you not also exaggerate, boast and bully for your own gain? Am I therefore not like you?
Unable to hold Trump to the same standards as a normal politician, one might think reporters would have feasted on Biden. Instead, some gambled on the hope that Trump would be defeated and normality restored – only to lose that bet.
[See also: Misogyny in the metaverse]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic